In the light of the previous negotiations, this is a remarkable document for the commissioners to have signed. It passed over in silence two main points on which they had been seeking concessions: insurance and transportation; by agreeing to deliver the tobacco in France they tacitly assumed the risks of the sea and responsibility for shipment in American bottoms. Last but not least, they agreed to a fixed price, although they had known for a month that commitment to that price might be ruinous.6 As late as March 17 they had insisted on an escape clause,7 yet a week later they signed the contract with no such clause.

If the Americans carried out the terms, Arthur Lee said later, they would lose two million livres; if they did not carry them out, and “there was not the remotest possibility that they would,” the breach of faith would jeopardize any future loans from the farmers general. All the commissioners achieved was to get their hands on the first instalment, a million livres. “If it was rash at first, it was infinitely more so after information they had received” of rising prices in Virginia.8 The point was well taken, assuming that the contract was what it seemed. But was it?

The advance was made on conditions that both parties must have known were unlikely to be fulfilled; hence fulfilment could not have been the prime consideration. The commissioners suggested as much a few weeks later, though in guarded fashion, when they sent news of the contract to the committee of secret correspondence: they hoped, presumably for the record, that the terms would be carried out even though disadvantageous; but the central point was that Vergennes was using the contract as a further means to finance the American cause. He had assured them, they implied, that if the tobacco could not be delivered at the stipulated price “Government will not suffer us to be losers.”9 The Minister presumably gave a similar assurance to the farmers general, for he seems to have been behind the whole affair.1 It was not a business deal to procure tobacco, but a political move, like the formation of Hortalez & Cie.; the purpose was to conceal a government subsidy of a million livres.

That purpose was secret, and the commissioners only hinted at it in writing to the committee. On the surface they negotiated a bona fide contract, thereby opening themselves to Lee’s later criticism. Whether or not he learned their real reasons for what they had agreed to in his absence, the apparent rashness of the agreement was a weapon against them; and by the time he made his observations in 1779 he was looking for any weapon. His attack was apparently justified but essentially irrelevant, for it was directed against what had happened on the stage. What mattered was behind the scenes.